as i lay abed, groaning, the daemon was up and about, and wrote:
The following information was provided by the package's contributor.
Name of contribution: mylatexformat Author's name: Florent CHERVET Location on CTAN: macros/latex/contrib/mylatexformat Summary description: Use mylatexformat.ltx to make a format based on the preamble of any LaTeX file License type: lppl
Announcement text given by the package's contributor:
Use mylatexformat.ltx to make a format based on the preamble of any LaTeX file.
The use of formats helps to speed up compilations: packages which have been dumped in the format are loaded at very high speed. This is useful when a document load many packages (pgf-TikZ among other...)
For the creation of the format use a command line like:
etex -initialize [opts] &pdflatex mylatexformat.ltx abc.tex
mylatexformat.ltx has been primarily written from mylatex.ltx (available on CTAN under the contrib/Carlisle/ directory) but gets rid of many limitations or problems of mylatex.ltx.
More precisely:
- The format is created from the beginning of the file
(usually documentclass[...]{...} until either: ~ egin{document} ~ endofdump if endofdump is encountered in the preamble ~ csname endofdumpendcsname for convenience: to avoid `undefined control sequence' in case the document is compiled without the format.
- egin{document} endofdump or csname endofdumpendcsname can be precedeed or followed by other macros or
commentaries.
- Commentaries in the preamble are ignored (braces are not
required to be equilibrated).
- packages that modify the document macro (like auxhook.sty
or etoolbox.sty) can be included in the format.
- A report is available in the .log file.
I have been using mylatexformat.ltx with MikTeX under: - pdfTeX in dvi mode - pdfTeX in pdf mode - XeTeX
Comments about its use on other system are welcome !
(whew!)
i've installed the new package and created an entry in the catalogue repository for it; thanks for the upload.
Users may view the package catalogue entry at http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/mylatexformat.html or they may browse the package directory at http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/mylatexformat
but the catalogue entry won't appear until some time tonight.
Robin Fairbairns
For the CTAN team